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“The thing about Anita O’Day is that she always sings jazz. And what makes her singing always jazz is her improvisation. She takes a musician’s liberties with phrasing, harmony and rhythm and does it all while singing lyrics that still manage to make sense.”
That excerpt from Dom Cerulli’s liner notes for the 1961 album All The Sad Young Men gets to the heart of what made O’Day, who died Thursday at age 87, the prototypical jazz singer.
Listening to O’Day at the top of her game is like watching a tight-rope walker trying to cross the Niagara gorge in a hurricane.
Even when you’ve heard a cut a hundred times, the former Big Band singer, who started out with Gene Krupa, had the amazing capacity to make you hold your breath in delicious anticipation of how she is going to get herself out of the vocal corner she will inevitably appear to paint herself into.
Mostly, she did find a brilliant way of extricating herself, and bring a new dimension to an old, familiar songs like Sweet Georgia Brown or Fly Me To The Moon. Even when she didn’t, you had to admire her considerable gumption. She dared to go places many other singers did not have the courage to venture.
Because part of her soft palate had been accidentally cut off during a childhood tonsillectomy, O’Day had no vibrato to speak of and was unable to sustain notes the way many other singers do.
Necessity being the mother of improvisation, she transformed her limitation into a strength, learning to present the material in upside-down, backwards and sideways configurations that made songs much more than they otherwise could ever have been.
O’Day not only sang on the edge, she lived on it too. A troubled childhood, which saw her spend two years as a “professional” endurance walker starting at age 14, a couple of bad marriages and a long-time addiction to heroin and alcoholism
all took their toll. Hell, if she’d lived a cleaner life, she probably would have made it to 187.
Although she could sing ballads beautifully (She does the definitive version of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square), it is standards taken at warp speed that really define the Chicago native. Her best work is probably the album she did with bandleader/trumpeter Billy May. She tears through 16 numbers by Cole Porter in a trip to the moon on galloping wings.
One of her better albums is Anita Sings The Most, which she made with Mississauga’s Oscar Peterson trio and her long-time drummer, John Poole, in early 1957.
Peterson remembered the date well when I spoke to him about it in 2003. Norman Granz had selected the material in advance and talked to O’Day about it, knowing that he was going to be away when the recording was made and Peterson would be left in charge.
The great Canadian pianist dutifully took the play list to the session. “She walked into the session and immediately suggested something that wasn’t on the list,” Peterson recalled with a laugh. “That’s not on the list,” Peterson said. “What list?” replied O’Day.
The record got made the Granz-Peterson way and is a standout, especially Them There Eyes and Old Devil Moon.
When it comes to O’Day and her music, there is no such thing as a smooth ride. She understood that perhaps the most important thing about music, especially jazz, is the sense of adventure you bring to it. Heaven knows, she never lacked for that.